Anomaly Research Centre:Exclusives/Sara Canning Interview
Primeval: New World unit publicist Crystal Braunwarth put ZEM in contact with Sara Canning for an interview. Sara Canning plays predator control expert Dylan Weir in New World. Thank you very much Sara for your patience and answers to my questions! ---- as Dylan Weir]] ---- 1. How did you become involved in Primeval: New World? Well, I auditioned for them. I’d encountered the producers before and Martin Wood was awesome. They liked what I brought to the table as Dylan Weir and we had a lot of fun with the audition and testing. I just dove right in! 2. Do you know if anyone else auditioned for the role? Yes. I know they auditioned a few other people for the role. 3. What were your first thoughts about the role? I was pretty excited at the beginning. It was such a specific skill set. I actually have an aunt who is a conservation officer, and I called her right away, because Dylan is very procedural at the beginning of Season 1. She definitely turns into much more of a dino-fighter toward the end of the season. I know some things about her backstory that I can’t really talk to you specifically about, because it hasn’t been revealed in the show, but I think specific things about her childhood will be brought up in later seasons that explain why she is the way she is. I was excited to work with that background knowledge. 4. Were you familiar with the original Primeval? I started watching it when I was auditioning for the show. It has been great looking for the parallels between the two shows. I think New World is a little darker than the original. 5. Did you have any previous experience with CGI? A little bit, from The Vampire Diaries. This has definitely been the most experience I’ve had with CGI and green screen. We’re working with visual effects constantly. So now I have a huge appreciation for sci-fi actors and what a large imagination they are required to have every day at work. It’s pretty awesome. 6. How is New World different from/similar to your previous work? The most action I’ve ever done, by far. I’ve been pretty lucky to play in a lot of different genres, this is the heaviest sci-fi that I’ve done, and the most technical role - not just dinosaur talk, but talking about the best ways to administer tranquilizers, things like that. A lot of gun talk. It’s been cool, it’s been a challenge. 7. What can you tell us about Dylan Weir? We first see Dylan as a conservation officer, a predator control expert, and she meets Evan Cross and is drawn into this world of anomalies and dinosaurs. She is really weirded out by it at first, because she’s been faced with what she knows and all her training and suddenly it all goes out the window, because she’s dealing with prehistoric creatures. Dylan has been trained that if something kills, you put it down. But when you deal with dinosaurs, that’s not really the way to do things any more - there’s that whole question of how we’re affecting the time-space continuum, when getting rid of creatures from the past. There’s a lot of growth in her character throughout Season 1 - how she’s dealing with this knowledge and having to reinvent her whole work philosophy. She’s very inventive and extremely intuitive, able to pick up on other people’s fear and translate that and help them deal with it quickly. She’s sort of the “anxiety reader,” she tries to keep everyone calm at all times. 8. Did you have any memorable moments on set that you would like to share with the fans? There’s been a ton… I’ve gotten to do some really cool stunt work, and I’ve got such a supportive crew. I just love the cast and crew on Primeval, they all get really excited. We just did some really cool shots at a hundred and twenty frames-per-second, it was really wild stunt work in slow motion, the camera crew is always really excited to play it back for us. I really love how physical I got to be in this, in this show I’ve really got to push some limits that I hadn’t gotten to before, which is really cool… Everything’s been really fun, I have a really great cast, they make coming to work so fun, we laugh all day long. It’s hard to pick one thing. It was a blast. 9. Anything else you’d like to tell Primeval fans about the show? I just really hope that they love it. I had the pleasure of working with Andrew-Lee Potts, and he’s wonderful. It was a nice tie-in with the original Primeval. I hope that fans of the original Primeval really get on board with what we’ve done over here in Canada and I hope that we grab lots of new fans too. We have the kings and queens of sci-fi working on Primeval: New World, so I hope that people love this show as much as they did Stargate and Sanctuary. I’d love the opportunity to do a Season 2, to do new stuff. 10. Do you have a favorite character? I can’t really pick one, everybody’s awesome! Out of the original, I would have to say Connor Temple. I am a little biased, because I’ve gotten to work with him. 11. Do you have a favorite creature in New World? Yes, but I don’t think I'm allowed to say. 12. Do you have a favorite episode in New World? Yeah. Even though our finale was the craziest to shoot, I think it’s definitely my favorite episode. Personally, the things I got to do in that episode were really awesome. ---- Note: All opinions expressed in interviews belong solely to the crew or cast member interviewed, and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of ZEM, Primeval Wiki or Omni Film Productions. Category:Primeval Wiki Exclusives